Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

After the recent addition of BEAM (Equihash 150,5) support on NiceHash the service for selling and buying mining hashrate has become more active and has just added two (three) more new algorithms – CuckARoo29 and CuckAToo31 used by GRIN and Lyra2REv3 used by VTC. NiceHash support for GRIN on the software side is still somewhat lacking, with the latest GMiner 1.28 pretty much currently the only available miner for Grin (CuckARoo29) available for Nvidia GPUs under Windows, no AMD Grin miners with proper NiceHash support for now it seems. Lyra2REv3 on the other hand is more widely supported and available already on multiple software miners for both AMD and Nvidia as it was an anticipated fork for VTC, so developers had the time to get ready. An example for a compatible AMD miner is the latest WildRig Multi and for Nvidia you can try the latest official ccminer by tpruvot or the latest CryptoDredge which is faster in terms of performance compared to ccminer. Due to the interest and demand for Grin mining hashrate currently profitability wise it might be interesting for Nvidia miners to try selling their hashrate on NiceHash and get paid in BTC for it while waiting for the Grin ecosystem to get more developed and functional that it is at the moment.

GMiner has been updated a lot recently with fixes and improvements and the latest version 1.26 is not an exception as it apparently tires to fix the BEAM mining support on NiceHash that has recently been introduced. Initially when NiceHash announced support for BEAM on their platform both GMiner and Bminer seemed to work just fine, however earlier today both miners started having issues with the platform. The problem seems to affect both miners for BEAM only on NiceHash, it does seem to work fine with other mining pools, but on NiceHash you are getting a lot of rejected shares with Bminer and pretty much all rejected n GMiner.

The just released Gminer v1.26 apparently tries to fix that and seems to succeed to some point, however after a while with everything seeming normal we are seeing the latest GMiner getting into a kind of look restarting itself without continuing to mine after that. The time it takes for the restarting loop does seem to vary from a mining rig to a mining rig, we have tried with a couple of them and in less than an hour all of them ended in the same watchdog reboot look for the miner. Running GMiner 1.26 on another pool for BEAM mining seems to be working just fine like with older versions, so the issue is apparently related only to NiceHash support. Of course you are welcome to try out the new miner and report if it works or not for NiceHash BEAM mining.

The GMiner Nvidia CUDA miner requires an Nvidia GPU with CUDA compute capability 5.0 or later as well as CUDA 9.0 driver support. Do note that GMiner is a closed source miner for Nvidia GPUs with binaries available for both Windows and Linux, also there is a 2% developer fee built-in the software.

Update: GMiner v1.26 has been temporary removed until properly fixed, so it is no longer available for download! GMiner 1.27 is now available with a properly fixed NiceHash support.

NiceHash hasn’t added new algorithms for a while now with ZHash being the last new addition in early December last year, so it is interesting that they have added support for BEAM now. This is both good and bad news for some people as the profit for selling your BEAM (Equihash 150,5) hashrate on NiceHash might bring you nice direct profit in BTC, but for the people mining BEAM directly is is not such good news as the hashrate has increased significantly and thus the difficulty is higher as well and less coins are being mined. Pool owners with BEAM support might be interested in checking out the BEAM NiceHash support specs in order to make sure that their pools will be compatible with hashrate coming from the service.

We have already tried some of the popular mining software with NiceHash and it seems that there are no problems connecting and using Bminer and Gminer on Nvidia GPUs does seem to work without problems (remove the SSL option from both miners), however the latest lolMiner for AMD does not seem to support NiceHash mining at the moment in its latest version. The algorithm that BEAM uses is Equihash 150/5, so other miners supporting that algorithm should in theory be compatible with NiceHash as well, though there is no guarantee for that.

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